Wednesday, 30 April 2014

While the election of a Liberal majority in la belle province has temporarily put to rest Quebec's separatist aspirations, perhaps indefinitely, events in eastern Ukraine suggest a possible civil war. Hoping it doesn't come to that we shouldn't overlook the irony of the situation, as this IWC bulletin points out, for Canada was cursed blessed with multiculturalism largely at the behest of Canada's Ukrainian-Canadian community.

It was while the Trudeau government was mulling over biculturalism and bilingualism that Ukrainian-Canadians championed the multicultural model. This worked for Trudeau who was in the process of breaking the once conservative voting stronghold of Toronto by flooding it with immigrants (now mostly third-world immigrants) who he imagined would reward the Liberal party with their votes. The plan worked and now all the parties are tripping over each other to curry favour with immigrant/ethnic vote blocs effectively handing immigration policy over to the interests of foreign born minority special interest groups; Canadians opinions on the matter be damned, or better yet, never sought.

The success of multiculturalism in Canada is debatable because it's hard to gauge how successful it is since we don't have adequate benchmarks that allow us to do so. Is multiculturalism successful in Canada because of the absence of race riots? Or is multiculturalism failing because Toronto and Vancouver are segregated along ethnic and racial lines?

Whatever the case it seems what's so great for Canada isn't so great for other countries. Or perhaps pronouncements of multiculturalism's success in Canada are premature.